Or… stuff and nonsense.

Main menu

Monthly Archives: August 2008

I’ve ordered some parts for my Dad’s PC down here in west Cornwall and they’re due for delivery today. So, I decided to take a look at where Citylink’s “local” offices were so as to gauge when the delivery window might be.

Can you believe that Citylink’s “local” depot is actually in Okehampton, Devon?! How on earth can they afford to do that?

For those who don’t know the geography of the area, Cornwall from tip to the border is approximately 70 miles and Okehampton isn’t on the border. So, for a deivery van to deliver to west Cornwall it’s a 200 mile round trip. Now, if you take into account the travel times for a van of about 2 hours from depot to the start of the delivery cycle and add haf an hour or so at the end of each day for the driver to do the paper work and assume that each drop-off of a parcel i going to take half an hour to allow for travel time, that means that there can only be 6 parcels delivered per van per shift. Seeing as the fuel for merely the round-trip (without the delivery) would probably be in the region of 6 gallons of DERV, this means that each parcel will have cost the delivery firm approximately £7 in fuel alone just for the tertiary part of the journey. This is already the total purchase price of the courier service.

Surely, given current fuel prices, this is madness and it would cost the company a whole lot less to have a more local delivery office, as they used to? After all, having the nearest office a quarter of the way to London they might as well go the whole hog and deliver to the whole of the southern half of England from one depot in Swindon and be done with it!